NASA Picks a New Mars Mission: InSight

The Jet Propulsion Lab, fresh from a victory on Mars, wins out over rival scientists on Earth.

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NASA today decided to fund a new Mars mission called InSight that will plumb the depths of the planet, seeking clues to Martian geology and planetary formation. The lessons it could learn would help tell scientists how Earth formed. The mission is scheduled to land on Mars in September 2016 and to operate for two years; it will be under the auspices of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which just completed the landing of Curiosity.

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is stationary. Rather than roving the surface like Curiosity, Spirit, or Opportunity, it will stay where it lands. InSight will carry an instrument to determine the planet's rotational axis, a subsurface heat probe, and a tool to measure seismic waves in "marsquakes."

"Mars has been less geologically active than the Earth," the team's website reads. "For example, it does not have plate tectonics—it actually retains a more complete record of its history in its own basic planetary building blocks: its core, mantle and crust." That is: Since Mars has changed comparatively little over the years, InSight should be able to look deep into the planet's history just by drilling down.

"Everyone is wild about the Red Planet these days," NASA administrator Charles Bolden says. "The recent successful landing of the Curiosity rover has galvanized public interest in space exploration, and today's announcement makes clear there are more exciting Mars missions to come."

The selection of InSight (which was chosen over two other finalists) also eases criticism of the Obama Administration and NASA that the MSL Curiosity landing could have been the last big Mars mission. The Obama administration has canceled NASA's plans for joint Mars missions with the Europeans in 2016 and 2018. "The figures speak for themselves," Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, wrote in a letter to The New York Times. "This year's NASA Mars exploration budget is $587 million. The administration is proposing to cut that to $360.8 million in fiscal year 2013, $227.7 million in 2014, and $188.7 million in 2015, a level that would effectively put the nation out of the Mars exploration business."

"Some of the people involved on MSL EDL [entry, descent, and landing team] would probably become part of the InSight team," says Fernando Abilleira of the Mission Design & Navigation Section, Inner Planet Mission Analysis Group at JPL. "InSight is more important than it may seem because it would allow for the lab to maintain this key competency." Indeed, with no other Mars missions funded, this choice preserves many of the skills developed by pricier missions like Curiosity.

This mission is not a class-A event like the Mars Science Lab mission. InSight was funded under NASA's Discovery program, which sponsors higher risk, less expensive solar system exploration missions with highly focused scientific goals. (Curiosity cost $2.5 billion while InSight will tally only about $425 million.) InSight won out over two other Discovery finalists selected last year: Comet Hopper, a mission by NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center that would do just what the name implies, and Titan Mare Explorer, an ambitious project to explore Saturn's moon Titan and its bevy of organic molecules. More about that project here.